Who could have seen this coming? The Washington Post has released, with great fanfare, “The Afghanistan Papers”, a massive study documenting what a massive disaster the War in Afghanistan has been. It’s too bad, however, that the Post has “forgotten” how earnestly it pushed that misbegotten war, as recently as August of this year, something…
Tag: War in Afghanistan
Orlando explained! Well, sort of.
Over at Bloomberg, Pankaj Mishra gives a nice take on “The Messy Mind of Omar Mateen”, noting that, among other things, “Mateen was mentally unstable, according to his divorced first wife. His Afghan-born father spoke of his son’s hatred of gays. Obama confirmed that the Islamic State had not directed the attack even though Mateen…
Hey, Hey, President Obama! How many kids did you kill today?
If you see a couple of kids in Afghanistan digging a hole beside a road, what do you do? Open fire! Yep, that’s how it goes in the big A, or Afstan, or whatever it is that GIs call Afghanistan. Dan Lamothe and Joe Gould, staff writers with the Military Times, flesh out my brief…
The Obama Administration: Once the failure of our policy in Afghanistan becomes obvious to the American people, they’ll be more willing to pretend that it’s a success
Yes, that seems to be thinking around the White House these days, if you can believe the New York Times—and on this occasion I can. According to Mark Landler “The killing of two American servicemen and the eruption of deadly anti-American protests in Afghanistan confronts President Obama with a potential political weakness in a foreign…
Ten Years After
Ten years after the U.S. began its occupation/liberation of Afghanistan, we still haven’t figured out how to relate to a nation of poppy-growing Muslim fundamentalists. It might seem “obvious” to some that burning Korans is not a good idea when you’re trying to teach Muslims how enlightened you are and how much you respect their…
Peace? Sure! Peace with frequent random murders and the occasional contrived crisis
Yesterday’s post, which implied, to quote Henry Kissinger, that peace is at hand, perhaps suggested that I’ve grown optimistic about our future. Well, not so much. Americans, and the American establishment, may be growing tired of our Afghanistan adventure, but we have yet to abandon the joys of remote-controlled murder. The Bureau of Investigatory Journalism…
Suppose you gave a war and everybody got so bored they wanted to go home?
That seems to be the way things are shaking down in Afghanistan. As Slateman Fred Kaplan notes, when Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta stated, rather offhandedly, on February 1 that “hopefully” the U.S. would be “transitioning” [that is, getting the hell out of Kabul] in 2013, rather than the previously announced/anointed victory year of 2014,…
So does that mean we lied?
Yesterday Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, speaking in Kabul, offered “sincere condolences and personal regrets” for recent deaths of Afghan civilians as a result of U.S. air strikes. You may remember that on August 22 a U.S. airstrike killed “five to seven” civilians, according to the U.S. military. Or was it closer to 90? Gates…
Keeping Posted: The Myths Keep Coming
Myth debunking has become a full-time job on the editorial pages of the Washington Post. Last Sunday, Jacob Heilbrunn debunked five myths regarding “those nefarious neocons.” On Monday, Ann Marlowe took on two myths regarding Afghanistan. Myth 1. Hamid Karzai is a good president who looks after American interests. Myth 2. The second is that…
Richard Holbrooke, acting bold, sort of
Richard Holbrooke, former ambassador to the United Nations back in the Clinton days, doesn’t mince words when describing the Bush Administration’s efforts to eliminate the poppy crop in Afghanistan: “the program, which costs around $1 billion a year, may be the single most ineffective program in the history of American foreign policy. It’s not just…